The Challenge

Welding fixtures are assembled from inaccurate modular fixturing or expensively machined, forcing you to choose between quality or cost.

The Solution

Markforged 3D printed welding fixtures are heat-resistant enough to operate near welding surfaces while being conformal and accurate.

The Impact

Printing welding fixtures allows you to achieve the weld quality of CNC fixtures for the cost and complexity of low-fidelity solutions.

3D Printing Welding Fixtures

The only thing more critical to welding success than good fixturing is a good welder. For welds more complex than joining planar surfaces, welding fixtures help welders ensure that they’re joining the right things together in the right locations. Conventional welding fixtures tend to fall into three categories—expensive machined components, uncustomized modular fixturing, and hacked-together solutions. Each of these has its own downside: machined fixtures are effective but expensive to produce, modular fixtures are cheap but difficult to assemble, and hacked-together solutions produce poor welds far more often than successful ones.

With 3D printing, you can marry the quality and ease-of-use of machined fixtures with the cost and manufacturing simplicity of modular fixtures. Markforged parts are heat-resistant enough to hold the vast majority of welded parts, and can easily integrate with metal hardware to provide extra heat buffers if necessary. Complexity is free on 3D printed welding fixtures—as a result, you can design parts that conformally and securely hold complex assemblies for welding. If your design changes, you can quickly and cheaply print an updated fixture.